Police Brutality Divides America

America has had a problem with police brutality for a long time. Every year hundreds of people die at the hands of American police and many more are beaten up. In 2014 alone at least 587 people were killed by cops. You can see a graph of this below.

What galvanised Americans was the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in the town of Ferguson, Missouri by white police officer Darren Wilson. The fact that Brown was unarmed and the belief that he was running away when Wilson started shooting and then put his hands up to surrender infuriated folks in Ferguson. The latter led to the protest slogan “hands up, don’t shoot”. Pretty soon the whole country was transfixed by what was happening in Ferguson and protests started springing up all across America. Many people noted that police officers in the United States disproportionately target black males, leading the protests to take a racial angle. Eventually the Prosecuting Attorney, Robert McCulloch, decided to convene a grand jury to decide whether or not to indict Officer Wilson in the death of Mike Brown.

The grand jury decided on the 24^th of November to not indict Officer Wilson, which led to huge protests throughout America. As people have looked deeper into how McCulloch performed his job, it has become pretty clear that he threw the case. He used a ‘witness’ who was a known liar to the Attorney to back up Wilson’s testimony. McCulloch has even admitted that he knew that she lied, but he still put forward her testimony! He also gave the grand jury a copy of a Missouri state law which stated that police officers were allowed to shoot fleeing suspects. This is particularly important in the Brown case as there is a lot of witness testimony that states that Brown was fleeing when Wilson began shooting. However laws like that had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1985!

As protests were ongoing we learnt of a 12 year old boy called Tamir Rice from Cleveland, Ohio who had been shot and killed by a police officer a couple of days before the news about Wilson getting away with killing Brown broke. He had been shot by cops less than two seconds after police pulled up beside him. He was on his own, he was 12, he was not a threat to anyone, and cops killed him. It makes me feel physically sick. Then to add fuel to the fire news broke that a grand jury in Staten Island, New York had decided not to indict police officers involved in the death of Eric Garner. There is video footage of Garner’s death that shows just how awfully the police officers involved behaved. You can clearly see that it is the police officers who started, then escalated, the confrontation, not Eric Garner. One officer then puts Garner in an illegal chokehold and kills him. I cannot believe that a grand jury watched that video and thought that there should not be an indictment.  

Since there is no official count of the amount of people killed by American police, it is impossible to know exactly how many people have been killed this year. For this graph I used Wikipedia, which lists individual police killings with links to articles about them. By definition there will be more deaths than listed, as there will be ones which were unreported by the media or simply never made it onto Wikipedia. You should notice an uptick in deaths following August. I would hypothesise that since that is when protests began, that the media started to report a lot more on police killings and hence we see a spike in the graph. If this is true then police killings were dreadfully under-reported. If we take the monthly average of August-December and apply it to all of 2014 then you could estimate that 986 people were killed by cops, rather than 587.

Protests have been pretty continuous since the end of November and have even gone international. I was at a vigil for Mike Brown in Manchester in the United Kingdom! Despite that clear problem of police violence, the cases have divided America. Liberals are trying to change America whilst many conservatives deny that there’s a problem. The question for the future is: can America tackle the problem of police brutality?

Belfast Protests Enter 6th Week

When Belfast City Council voted on the 3^rd of December to only fly the flag on certain days of the year, most people did not realise what this would trigger. The action infuriated many unionists who feel that their British identity has been under threat for a long time. This vote was the final straw and they’ve been protesting ever since. Many of the protests have gone off peacefully but there have been many that have turned violent. On Friday night 29 police officers were injured in a confrontation in East Belfast between nationalists and protesters.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there is any end in sight and riots are breaking out with increasing frequency. Thankfully the protests and violence have been largely confined to Belfast, although there have been flashpoints all across Northern Ireland. In reality this could not have happened at a worse time, after a year of poor sales, shopkeepers and other businessmen were hoping that Christmas would bring a much needed boost to sales. A fear of roads being blocked by protesters and the threat of violence kept most people away. This has had a serious effect on the business community, some entrepreneurs have reported losses up to tens of thousands of pounds! 2013 was supposed to be a good year for NI; Derry/Londonderry (NI’s second city) has the UK City of Culture, Derry has been listed by a number of travel guides as one of the top destinations in 2013. This was supposed to be the year that we started to send out good images to the world. Yet this year has begun with images of violence and protests. Great.

Police are caught in the middle of clashes between nationalists and protesters
source: telegraph.co.uk

Plebgate Scandal Returns

It was supposed to have been largely wrapped up when Andrew Mitchell resigned as government chief Whip but this week the ‘plebgate’ scandal has taken a new turn. A police officer has been arrested over allegations that he submitted false evidence, the officer claimed that he was a member of the public that was passing by the gate to Downing Street when he heard the row between police and Mitchell. He claimed that he heard Mitchell use the word pleb – an allegation that Mitchell has always denied. He claims that he was with a group of tourists who were shocked at the way the chief whip spoke to police. CCTV footage has now emerged that there was nobody near the gate at the time of the incident, never mind a crowd.

This all was naturally welcomed by Mitchell and his supporters who now see the tide of public opinion turning in Mitchell’s favour. Mitchell and his allies are also furious at the Police Federation who in the weeks following Mitchell’s confrontation appeared to use the plebgate scandal as a way to get revenge on the government for police cuts and changes to their pay and conditions.

Although we will never know for certain whether Mitchell used the world pleb, two officers who were definitely present accuse him of using that word whereas Mitchell denies it. This is still a very serious allegation, the officer in question will almost certainly lose his job and there may be others within the force who will have to leave. 

The Collapse of the British Establishment

It has been over two months now since the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal was first made public, yet its affects still dominate news headlines. Accusations that senior politicians were involved in paedophile sex rings have been swarming on the internet for over a week. Yesterday one of those accused hit back, Lord McAlpine called the speculation “wholly false and seriously defamatory”. The rumours started as a result of a BBC Newsnight investigation into abuse in north Wales children’s homes. In the broadcast a man stated that he had been abused by a senior Conservative from the Thatcher era, although McAlpine was never named. On Twitter however, his name was banded about as the abuser, and it is true that Steven Messham (the victim) did believe that McAlpine was the abuser. He has since reversed his accusation after being shown a photograph of McAlpine and has apologised for falsely accusing him. This has led Newsnight into some serious trouble, what sort of shoddy journalism was at work when they didn’t even both to confirm that McAlpine was definitely the abuser?

It would seem like this scandal is intent on destroying the BBC and Newsnight’s reputation. Although I have no doubt that the BBC will continue as the world’s largest broadcaster, I fear for Newsnight’s future. The programme usually has excellent journalism and to cancel it would be a travesty.

If we move away from this scandal alone you begin to realise something: The British Establishment is collapsing. It really began back in 2007/2008 when the economy went into freefall, the institutions that had caused the crash saw their reputation plummet: Banks. Yet it also tarnished politics, why had the government massively deregulated the financial sector? And why did the opposition say nothing about it? Move alone to 2009 and politics has a scandal of its own, this time over expenses. Many MPs and Peers had made unfair, and sometimes illegal claims for expenses. Since then a number of politicians have gone to jail, destroying politicians’ already abysmal reputation. In 2011 the police, press and politicians all got caught up in one massive scandal. It all started with revelations that the News of the World had hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, in 2002. Soon it became clear that thousands of people had been hacked, the families of dead soldiers and victims of 9/11 and 7/7. The public’s complete revulsion of what was discovered resulted in the News of the World being closed. The scandal turned to police when people questioned their relationship with journalists and the possibility of corruption. Public anger also erupted over the closeness of senior Tory politicians with the press, particularly PM David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt.  Since then numerous branches of the press have shown to act unlawfully, particularly Murdoch papers; the Sun, the Times and News of the World all being implicated. As well as that, senior executives within Murdoch’s company News Corporation have been arrested surrounding the scandal. Then you move forward to this year, banks saw their reputation further damaged as three British institutions were found to have dodgy, and sometimes illegal dealings. The current abuse scandal threatens to further destroy the establishment’s reputation. The public are at record low levels of trust with banks, politicians, police, the press and now the BBC. The only nationwide institution still standing on high approval ratings is the NHS, let’s hope it doesn’t find a scandal of its own.  

Bo Xilai Political Scandal

Neil Heywood's death has serious
consequences for China's leaders

The death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood is causing earthquakes in Chinese politics. Heywood was close to one of China’s most powerful men, Bo Xilai, a possible future leader of China. Until now. When Mr Heywood died in November last year, the cause of the death was given as alcohol poisoning. No autopsy was ever performed and his body was later cremated. Alarm bells started ringing when friends described him as “not a serious drinker”.

In the months that followed, a Chinese police chief fled to an American embassy claiming foul play in the Heywood case. Since this, Bo Xilai’s wife, Gu, has been arrested, strongly suspected of being involved in Mr Heywood’s murder.

The Heywood scandal combined with the upheaval of Wang Lijun incident have resulted in China’s greatest political scandal in over two decades. Xilai’s downfall comes just as a leadership change is about to occur, if it had not been for Xilai’s downfall he could well have been made leader. Xilai was viewed as the leader of the more extreme left of the Communist Party. With Xilai gone, the next leader will likely be a more pro-market communist. 

The West should pay close attention to what happens to China over the next few months, whoever replaces Hu Jintao as leader will have control over the emerging super power and can take the country forward or backwards.

Will the Met ever get over racism?

It is more than a decade since the Metropolitan Police was branded as institutionally racist by the MacPherson Inquiry. Yet there are still accusations of racism within the Met, currently there are 21 people under investigation for alleged racist incidents and this is just the ones we know about.

To be fair to the police officers, the vast majority are not racist and the Met has made significant improvements since it was branded institutionally racist, yet it still has a long way to go. The Met admitted that after the summer’s riots it needed to work with ethnic minorities to build bridges between police and minorities. It is believed that distrust of the police by ethnic minorities as having aggravated the riots in the summer and helping to spark them in the first place.

The Met must try and work better with other communities, but the fact that in 2012 there are still serious problems with racism worries me. Indeed racism in the Met is declining, maybe some day the Met will have no more racists than any other organisation. 

The Worrying Relationship Between the Met & the Sun

Today Sue Akers, the deputy assistant commissioner spoke to Lord Justice Leveson to tell him of the “culture of illegal payments” by Sun journalists to police officers and other public officials. What she spoke of threatens to engulf the Metropolitan Police with many more arrests likely to come, it will be the most devastating issue for the Met since the organisation was branded institutionally racist by the MacPherson inquiry. It is horrifying to think that some of those who are meant to uphold the law and make our streets safe were performing illegal activities themselves. It is absolutely sickening and every police officer who took payments should be sent to prison.

Yet nobody really knows the full story yet, both the Leveson inquiry and the investigation by Sue Akers will continue for many more months and delve further into both the cosy relationship between the police and the press and other illegal activities. Most notably at Murdoch’s big names, the News of the World and the Sun. My only hope is that this time the investigation will produce meaningful results and that both the press and the police will complete the necessary reforms to give us a free but law abiding press.

Only an idiot would believe Rebekah Brook’s or Andy Coulson’s statements that they did not know about phone hacking or other illegal activities as well as denials coming from senior journalists at the Sun or NOTW. There is much evidence that take apart Brook’s and Coulson’s lies, Jeff Edwards was the crime correspondent at a Murdoch paper between 1980 and 1985 and says he lost his job because he was uncomfortable paying police officers. This isn’t a simple hunch that Mr Edwards has come up with, he was actually told that he’d lost his job because of his ethics.

Nobody really knows that will happen over the next year but it will be an important one for this country in terms of both the press and policing, I just hope both institutions can reform.

Sue Aker at the Leveson Inquiry today

Sun Crisis Deepens

Today another twist occurred in the crisis at The Sun; Trevor Kavanagh, its associate editor, launched a scathing attack on the police. He called the arrests of five senior journalists heavy handed, out of proportion and an attack on freedom of speech. Many reporters at the Sun feel like they are being unfairly treated, they believe that their colleagues are being arrested because they did their job. They also feel betrayed by their News Corporation bosses and fear for their jobs, even though Rupert Murdoch has promised to keep the newspaper open, unlike its sister paper, News of the World. Kavanagh believes that the company has deliberately framed the recently arrested journalists to get out of jail themselves. This is a very serious accusation.

My feeling is quite the opposite, the police investigate crimes and the reporters at the Sun are being investigated by the police. Everyone in the country should be subject to the same laws, no special privileges for one profession or another. If reporters are guilty of corruption, then they should be sent to prison like everyone else. This claim that it attacks the freedom of the press is ridiculous and just plain silly, News Corporation are trying to turn public opinion against the police by calling the investigation a “witch hunt”. We all know why they want the investigation to stop, the further the police delve the more dirt they will find on Sun reporters. This could do a further blow to the Sun in a time when newspaper circulations are in perpetual decline.

Yet the virus that began with 2011’s hacking scandal hasn’t stopped at the Sun, it has spread to America too. In the States there is a law called the “Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” concerning bribery of foreign officials and other illegal activities, the FBI is looking into both the hacking at the News of the World and the bribery claims at the Sun. This could significantly damage Murdoch in the USA, many in his American press and media companies want him to let the UK companies go as the Americans feel they are being dragged down by the revelations about their British counterparts.

Regardless of what happens as a result of these arrests, Murdoch’s media empire is collapsing with the UK being the first country to lose his slimy grip. When it does, I will celebrate. 

Scandal at the Sun

 Ever since the phone hacking scandal erupted last year, Rupert Murdoch has been mired in scandal after scandal. The most recent was at the Sun, one of his most important newspapers. Yesterday five senior journalists were arrested; this included chief reporter, John Kay, picture editor, John Edwards, foreign correspondent Nick Parker, reporter, John Sturgis, and even the deputy editor, Geoff Webster. The newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch has stated that unlike its sister newspaper, the News of the World, the Sun will not be closed. Today’s arrests were not only significant because of the journalists arrested; an army officer, policeman and civil servant were also arrested. This is the first time that such arrests have been made under Operation Elveden, which is investigating illegal payments by journalists to get information. This crisis occurs during the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, which was set up after the fallout from the original scandal at NOTW. This, combined with evidence of harassment of people by journalists only further proves that there needs to be some sort of regulation of the press. This would not harm free speech, but strengthen the rights of individuals to privacy. The only reason you hear the likes of Paul Dacre claiming it would harm free speech is because of nasty practices going on in the Daily Mail, a newspaper which has been accused of dabbling in illegal activities by a number of high profile names.

We won’t know for a long time what the full extent of illegal activities at newspapers was, but unless a press regulator is created with real power, we will be looking at another press scandal in the future. This saga has shown that the press, particularly the tabloids, to be untrustworthy and must be dealt with harshly.

The Sun is the latest Murdoch newspaper to be mired in scandal

Policing Board's Annual Human Rights Report

Yesterday the Northern Ireland Policing Board launched their seventh annual human rights report in Derry/Londonderry. The occasion was styled as a “let’s talk” event with a panel of representatives from the Policing Board and Matt Baggott, the chief constable for the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland). During the debate, Baggott defended the intelligence services when a Republican on the panel and a few members of the floor called them the “dark side” of policing. Baggott repudiated with the statement that “If it hadn't been for intelligence, we would have had cases of mass murder in Northern Ireland [in 2011]”. This is a frightening idea as the only bomb in 2011 to claim a life was that of police officer Ronan Kerr. The rest only caused inconvenience and minor damage. It is scary to think that there are still people who want to return Northern Ireland to the violence and fear of the Troubles. I agree with Baggott in that people should not compare the intelligence services to the dark side as it does not help anyone and only increases resentment in communities (particularly nationalist ones) towards the police force. As Mick Fealty said on Twitter “The last 25 minutes have been brought to you by Star Wars…”

The issue around “punishment” attacks also arose during the debate and, as the Republican representative rightly pointed out, we should not call them “punishment attacks” as the word punishment implies that the person has done something to deserve the attack, which is not true. Another issue brought up was that of the re-hiring of retired RUC officers, Baggott said that ex-RUC officers who refused to co-operate with investigations into the past should not be re-hired.

The PSNI has come a long way in the past decade, but there is still plenty of work to be done to truly bring the two communities of Northern Ireland together into one.